Covering Mandela in '63

Listening to BBC after Nelson Mandela
died left me sleep deprived. It was virtually nonstop from midnight to 5
a.m. on WVXU, and BBC demonstrated how a first-class news organization
covers a major story.

The broadcasts carried me back to 1990
when I stayed up to see the telecast of Mandela walking out of prison.
There was no way I wouldn’t see that. Here’s the backstory: As a college
student, I knew why Miriam Makeba couldn’t sing in her native South
Africa and I read about the Sharpeville massacre, but Mandela, Mbeki,
Sisulu and Slavo weren’t yet part of my active conscience.

That ignorance ended when I joined UPI in
London in 1962 and began graduate work at the School of Oriental and
African Studies. Violent black Africa was a place for a budding
photojournalist; I wanted to go there. So I studied African
anthropology.

London was a hotbed of anti-apartheid
activism and UPI handled news from Southern Africa. Part of my job was
to scan London dailies, including the fiercely anti-apartheid Guardian,
for stories UPI should have. Mandela and his revolutionary ANC
comrades, as well as key figures and places in apartheid South Africa,
were frequent news. I learned about violent townships and commuter
trains, brutal police, the deadly Marshall Square jail in Jo’burg
and Robben Island prison in Cape Town bay.

By late 1963, I was in Africa. UPI sent
me with the Philippine president’s coast-to-coast tour en route home
from JFK’s funeral. Stops included Liberia, Kenya and Tanzania, three
independent, black-ruled countries.

I flew from Dar es Salaam to Salisbury,
Rhodesia, and got my first dose of white minority rule in that British
colony. There, I sought out Joshua Nkomo, a leader of the black
independence movement.

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I found him in a cloud of tear gas after police
broke up a demonstration in the Harare township.

White Rhodesians had not yet declared
unilateral independence from Britain nor had black Rhodesians taken to
the bush in what became a civil war leading to black majority rule.

Local papers were solidly behind the
white minority government, and news of the major terrorism trial in
neighboring South Africa was prominent. Defendants were Mandela and key
ANC comrades. They all were principal figures in ANC’s armed wing,
Umkhonto we Sizwe. They were charged with sabotage and attempting to
overthrow South Africa’s white minority government. (This is why Mandela
was on the U.S. terrorism watch list … until 2008.)

After a few days, I flew to my new job in Northern Rhodesia, a British Protectorate known now as Zambia. Our weekly Zambia News reported Mandela’s trial but our focus was on black majority rule in soon-to-be-independent Zambia.

White-minority rule to the south —
Rhodesia and South Africa — and to the east and west — Portuguese
Mozambique and Angola — was a concern for landlocked Zambia with its
dependence on exported copper and affinity with independence movements.

Beyond those realities, Mandela’s fate
was a living story to us, not least because Zambia quietly was host to
ANC fugitives and Umkhonto we Sizwe members training to return to South
Africa as saboteurs.

White miners on the Zambian Copper Belt —
largely Afrikaners supportive of South African apartheid — offered a
dramatically different perspective. To them, ANC was a terrorist
organization, and overwhelming numbers of black South Africans at home
were a mortal threat if not kept “in their place.”

I heard in our local pub; miners valued
their lucrative jobs and comfortable life style too much to flee.
However, impending Zambian independence and revelations from Mandela’s
trial and stunning four-hour closing argument in court created an
underlying anxiety about the white, and especially Afrikaner, future.

Anxiety over their children’s prospects persists among Afrikaners we met in South Africa in 2011.

By the time Mandela was sentenced to life in prison in 1964, we had assembled an international crew to publish the Zambia Times.
A handful were South Africans. With one exception, their government
considered them to be fugitives because of their anti-apartheid
activities at home.

Those colleagues thought of themselves as
refugees or, at least in one case, a refugee who really was a fugitive
for his role in the South African Communist Party.

None of them had met Mandela before
leaving South Africa. Like the rest of us, they knew him and his
comrades only through words and deeds. That was enough.

We knew he and his closest comrades were
political activists who despaired of peaceful change and turned to
violence. It was a classic case of “one man’s terrorist is another man’s
freedom fighter.”